graphics

On paper, Little Briar Rose isn't anything particularly exciting. It's a competent side-scrolling adventure title, a rookie effort from developer Elf Games, that retells the Grimm fairy tale of the same name. But the game's visuals, painstakingly crafted to look like an animated stained glass window on every frame, are downright breathtaking. In a sea of pixelated graphics and safe me-too styles, Little Briar Rose is a breath of fresh air.

Games are a little more complicated to review than apps. Maybe the story and premise are intriguing and engulfing, but the controls are horrible. Or maybe the graphics are gorgeous, but the gameplay is terribly bad. What rating do you give? You might err toward an average rating, but wouldn't it be better if there was an easy way to specify which aspects were good and which were disappointing, for the benefit of the devs as well as other users?

One Play Store interface change might solve that problem. New Feature Ratings circles have started showing up for some users, letting them see separate ratings for a game's controls, gameplay, and graphics.

The Vulkan graphics API is a big deal for mobile developers, since its direct GPU access allows for complex graphics to be rendered with a considerably lower hit to the processor, and thus a lower overhead on the hardware and battery life. A few devices like the SHIELD family and Samsung's 7 series already supported Vulkan several months ago, but Nougat now features full support for all updated Android 7.0 devices. Developer Super Evil Megacorp, which turned heads last year with its Vainglory mobile MOBA, now has a beta version that uses the Vulkan API.

Benchmarking applications like 3DMark and PassMark are great for scoring the graphics or computational power of a given device. Nenamark 2 was a popular choice for benchmarking graphics back in the day, and five years after Nenamark 2 launched, Nenamark 3 has arrived. It's not clear why.

I hesitate to even call Nenamark 3 a benchmarking app. It's designed like a game - the benchmark proceeds through levels, each level having up to four tests. But the benchmark ends as soon as your device can't reach a steady FPS arbitrarily determined by the Nenamark app. So instead of a useful score like an average FPS or the time it took to complete the test, my Nexus 5X gets a score of "3-0." Uhh...

Unless you regularly develop video games or other visually-intensive programs, you probably don't know what Vulkan is. That's OK. But if you are in the habit of developing visually complex apps for Android, the news that Google plans to support the Vulkan API is a big deal indeed. And it looks like the company intends to jump into the Vulkan pool with both feet: Google has just hired an entire team of dedicated Vulkan developers and folded them into the Android team.

Here's the gist: Vulkan is a cross-platform, low-overhead graphics API created by a consortium called Khronos (get it?). The advantage of Vulkan over other standards is that it gives developers direct access to GPU hardware, allowing a game to manually manage things like GPU cores and memory.

Some graphical benchmarks are meant to be fairly boring but reliable tests of visual output - the reliable Quadrant benchmark from Aurora Softworks is a good example. Others create an intense graphical test by making a fully-realized 3D environment, essentially a tech demo that's meant to be a digital ruler for the performance of competing components or devices. 3DMark's Android benchmark, with its space battle cutscene, is one of these tests.

Now there's an alternative version of 3DMark. It tests the same technical parameters: frames per second, physics engine accuracy, power output, that sort of thing. The only thing that's different is the 3D cutscene.

NVIDIA has been the first few pebbles of the landslide that is CES for the last few years, and 2015 is no different. To kick off the world's biggest consumer tech show, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang started with mobile. The company announced its successor to the Tegra K1 mobile processor, the Tegra X1. This chip includes an octa-core 64-bit CPU married to a 256-core GPU. And that second chip is the killer: it's based on the same architecture as the latest full-sized NVIDIA desktop graphics cards, Maxwell.

While Huang was quick to point out the chip's fantastic graphical capabilities (without going into extreme detail), he also wanted to show off its video rendering prowess.

Have you felt the call of video game development? Maybe you've seen some game featured in the news and thought, "That sucks, I can do way better." Well, put your money where your mouth is and prove it. StackSocial is giving customers the opportunity to name their own price and pick up two courses offered by Udemy on the topics of game development and design, or pick up two additional courses by beating the average price.

In case you're not familiar with Udemy, it's an online training service that currently offers over 20,000 courses on a very wide variety of topics.

Hey, did you know that John Woo made an Android game? You will by the time you read the Play Store description for Chillingo's latest title, Bloodstroke. The first screenshot is literally the game's logo and a headshot of the well-known Hong Kong movie director and producer, with his name featured twice. You know, just in case you didn't get the message. Exactly how Woo is involved in Bloodstroke isn't mentioned - is he a designer? Producer? Art director? Did he code the entire thing by hand on the set of Windtalkers? We don't know, and it doesn't matter.

To give credit where it's due, Bloodstroke is a gorgeous game, more because of its visual style than the polygonal graphics themselves.

We featured Audio Glow when it launched in November of last year. This ultra-stylish music visualizer takes the basic visual component of classic hi-fi systems and gives it a fresh coat of paint. It's gained quite a following thanks to eye-popping visuals and a huge degree of customization. Today's version 2.0 update adds some interesting options, most notably the new "Glowing Strings" visualization, below.

This nifty option is available as a $1 in-app purchase for the main Music Visualizer app, but the developer has kindly included a 5-minute preview that you can check out before buying. The IAP works across the primary app and the Live Wallpaper add-on.